This is an elegy. The aroma of deep sadness arises from its pages. As a football-loving sentimentalist, at first I inhaled it deeply.

The game of the title was played at Anfield on 26 May 1989. Cowley makes a convincing case for it being pivotal in cultural and sporting terms. Liverpool had won the FA Cup six days previously and now had the league title sewn up. Almost. To pinch the title, Arsenal had to win by two clear goals. Which they did, against all expectation, when Michael Thomas scored in the last minute of the game, of the season.

It was an enthralling game, overcast by grief. Six weeks earlier, 96 Liverpool supporters had died in the Hillsborough catastrophe. Cowley's thesis is that the Liverpool-Arsenal match was the end of an era. "The Taylor Report [on Hillsborough], with its recommendation for all-seater stadiums and its enlightened liberalism, changed English football for ever"; it marked "a moment of profound and irreversible cultural shift".

Cowley's exploration of these cultural and historical matters is fine, discursive journalism. But his writing finds fresh legs in the book's other dimension. The Last Game is also a memoir centring on the relationship between Cowley and his complex and charismatic father.

Tony Cowley was an east Londoner from Upton Park who prospered in "the rag trade". After marrying, he moved to Harlow, paradoxically an urban utopia without a football team. Or roots. This is the core of the book, whose underlying subject is the severance of connection between people and place, fans and team. Tony - "TC" - acquired the trappings, and the insecurities, of the postwar upwardly mobile man. He compensated for the latter with an unswerving loyalty to West Ham (his son, in an Oedipal gesture, supported Arsenal). There's a poignant, revelatory moment in the book when Cowley finds his father studying photographs of the Blitz through a magnifying glass. "Sometimes," TC says, "I wonder if I'll see someone I knew. Sometimes I wonder even if I might see myself." A couple of days later, he died of a stroke at a working-men's club. He was 56.

The Last Game ends in a rancorous lament for the lost "people's game". The usual grotesques of the modern game are duly excoriated: dodgy foreign oligarchs; mad transfer fees and prohibitive ticket prices; arrogant, bling-encrusted players often paid more than an incompetent banker's pension; the deleterious effect on the national side of too many foreign players in the top echelons, and so on. Well, yes, maybe. We fans are notoriously nostalgic; who could deny that it was a better world when Stanley Matthews was earning 10 bob a week? But this is a political book. Cowley is the editor of the New Statesman, and right in front of goal he gets nutmegged by his own ideology. His key events occurred in the Thatcher years, and she bulks large in the background. Cowley is almost comically lenient with her. She "had been, I think, too neglectful of those who depended on the state for welfare support". She "won" the "bitter little wars with the miners and the print unions". After 10 years of Thatcher, England was "a more confident and more racially tolerant country ... generally more at ease".

That's not how I remember it. (But then, unlike Cowley, I wasn't going to ecstasy-fuelled raves.) He writes of the raging violence attendant upon football in the 80s, but declines the obvious connection with Tory policy: that supporters were often the very people whose industries and communities were its victims. And the truly pivotal event that turned the game into one "defined by egoism, rapacity and greed" was not Hillsborough; it was the purchase, in effect, of the new Premiership by Sky, owned by Thatcher's good friend Rupert Murdoch.

Cowley is, I think, uneasily aware of all this. At one point he speaks, almost regretfully, of "the free-market orthodoxies to which both main British political parties continue to adhere". But he can't have it both ways. If football, like our deregulated financial institutions, collapses under the weight of its own bloat, well, that's those "free" market forces for you. Protectionism is the economics of nostalgia. Nothing can be defended from globalisation, not even "our" beautiful, ugly game.